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The Frederick Douglass Papers

Who corresponded with whom, and which places each correspondent's folders mention.

People in the index

15 highest-ranked people

  1. Frederick Douglass 1,122 correspondents
  2. Helen Pitts Douglass 161 correspondents
  3. Fredericka D. Perry 20 correspondents
  4. Julia G. Crofts 7 correspondents
  5. Charles R. Douglass 5 correspondents
  6. Martha W. Greene 5 correspondents
  7. Wm. H. H. Hart 5 correspondents
  8. A. Battiste 4 correspondents
Show all 15 peopleShow fewer people
  1. Charles A Preston 4 correspondents
  2. Chas. A. Preston 4 correspondents
  3. Gerrit Smith 4 correspondents
  4. H. O. Wagoner 4 correspondents
  5. Hon. B. K. Bruce 4 correspondents
  6. Jas M Gregory 4 correspondents
  7. Jas T. Bradford 4 correspondents

Reviewed identities only: 2,103 printed forms are not ranked here, the salutations, the unresolved surname and the forms the review has not reached; each is still findable above.

Places in the index

15 highest-ranked places

  1. Washington 162 records
  2. New York 148 records
  3. Boston 128 records
  4. Philadelphia 108 records
  5. Rochester 107 records
  6. Chicago 106 records
  7. Anacostia 88 records
  8. Cedar Hill 88 records
Show all 15 placesShow fewer places
  1. London 87 records
  2. Baltimore 74 records
  3. Paris 61 records
  4. Providence 60 records
  5. Haiti 58 records
  6. Port-au-Prince 55 records
  7. Cleveland 53 records
About this index

Dataset and reviewed rules

Tier 1: derived from the published letters index, the reviewed correspondent groups and the reviewed place list by the rules below — no inference, no model. Post-fold (sitting 2026-09-05): 169 reviewed correspondent groups; 2090 printed forms remain groups of one below the review floor, disclosed. Corpus version 5db27b8755bd; 170 records. Weighting constants: PROVISIONAL — the EC sitting's constants (2026-08-30) reused pending the Douglass correspondence sitting; changed only by a sitting. raw count everywhere — the count is the fact; ordering is presentation.

Identities: 172 of the 2,262 names in this layer are reviewed groupings. A name marked “as printed” is a form no ruling has reached — it may be one person, several, or part of another identity; an unmarked name is a reviewed identity.

Names and terms in the same records

Rule: vocabulary term (aliases OR-folded) × correspondent, FOLDER-level co-occurrence: the term's whole-word hit on a folder text × the person's letters in that folder — never letter-level (letter boundaries are not delimited beyond the anchors)

Order: distinctive first (lift) — records * N / (deg_term * deg_person); N = total fts records; degrees = graph_term_records / graph_person_records counts; support floor 5.

SELECT t.slug FROM graph_term_records t JOIN graph_person_records p ON p.slug = t.slug WHERE t.term = :term AND p.person = :person ORDER BY t.slug

Corresponded with

Rule: letters carrying both parties (the boundary sentence), grouped by the unordered pair of correspondent groups; see the builder A correspondence is counted only where both a sender and a recipient were read from the letter itself; letters with one party read are in no edge.

Correspondence weighting: Shared letters divided by the smaller of the two correspondents' totals of letters sent and received. Support floor 5. provisional; the EC alongside floor reused as the correspondence floor.

SELECT id FROM letters WHERE (sender_group = :person_a AND recipient_group = :person_b) OR (sender_group = :person_b AND recipient_group = :person_a) ORDER BY year, id

derived from the published letters index (the boundary sentence: a correspondence counts only where both parties were read from the letter), the reviewed correspondent groups and the reviewed place list. Post-fold (sitting 2026-09-05): 169 reviewed correspondent groups; 2090 printed forms remain groups of one below the review floor, disclosed.. Each starter list retains the first 15 entries in the index's degree order, highest first, then by name. People are ordered by correspondents; places by records naming the term. These record totals are the graph's whole-word FTS counts, not the desk's separately verified mention census.

A page, not an answer: this shows who wrote to whom, counted over names as printed. How many letters passed between two people, and when, is a question for the desk — ask it there.